Critical Thinking

Critical thinking involves understanding social and cultural texts and contexts in ways that support productive communication and interaction.

• Analyze arguments.
• Accommodate opposing points of view.
• Interpret inferences and develop subtleties of symbolic and indirect discourse.
• Use writing and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating.
• Integrate ideas with those of others.
• Understand relationships among language, knowledge, and power.
• Recognize the constructedness of language and social forms.
• Analyze and critique constructs such as race, gender, and sexuality as they appear in cultural texts.

Rhetoric

Rhetoric focuses on available means of persuasion, considering the synergy of factors such as context, audience, purpose, role, argument, organization, design, visuals, and conventions of language.

• Adapt communication to circumstances and audience.
• Produce communication that is stylistically appropriate and mature.
• Communicate in standard English for academic and professional contexts.
• Sustain a consistent purpose and point of view.
• Use a variety of technologies to address a range of audiences.
• Learn common formats for different kinds of texts.
• Develop knowledge of genre conventions ranging from structure and paragraphing to tone and mechanics.
• Control such surface features as syntax, grammar, punctuation, and spelling.
• Create artifacts that demonstrate the synergy of rhetorical elements.
• Demonstrate adaptation of register, language, and conventions for specific contexts and audiences.
• Apply strategies for communication in and across both academic disciplines and cultural contexts in the community and the workplace.

Process

Processes for communication—for example, creating, planning, drafting, designing, rehearsing, revising, presenting, publishing—are recursive, not linear. Learning productive processes is as important as creating products.

• Find, evaluate, analyze, and synthesize appropriate primary and secondary sources.
• Develop flexible strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proofreading.
• Understand collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.
• Critique their own and others’ works.
• Balance the advantages of relying on others with [personal] responsibility.
• Construct and select information based on interpretation and critique of the accuracy, bias, credibility, authority, and appropriateness of sources.
• Compose reflections that demonstrate understanding of the elements of iterative processes, both specific to and transferable across rhetorical situations.

Modes and Media

Activities and assignments should use a variety of modes and media—written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal (WOVEN)—singly and in combination. The context and culture of multimodality and multimedia are critical.

• Interpret content of written materials on related topics from various disciplines.
• Compose effective written materials for various academic and professional contexts.
• Assimilate, analyze, and present a body of information in oral and written forms.
• Communicate in various modes and media, using appropriate technology.
• Use digital environments for drafting, reviewing, revising, editing, and sharing texts.
• Locate, evaluate, organize, and use research material collected from electronic sources, including scholarly library databases; other official (e.g., federal) databases; and informal electronic networks and internet sources.
• Exploit differences in rhetorical strategies and affordances available for both print and electronic composing processes and texts.
• Create WOVEN (written, oral, visual, electronic, and nonverbal) artifacts that demonstrate interpretation, analysis, synthesis, evaluation, and judgment.
• Demonstrate strategies for effective translation, transformation, and transference of communication across modes and media.